The coming half of 2017

It’s 2017, what have I been doing the past years?
Well, there hasn’t been as much time for creative work next to my day-job as web application developer.
I spend the little spare time I have writing fiction, which I love doing. Time is short, but there is no way I could be without my creative work.
However being a game developer most of my life, I miss the excitement that comes from new game projects.
My experience in the game industry taught me, I don’t enjoy the commercial side of making games. What I do love is making games to tell a story.

Stories were what lead me to making games in the first place, but stories in games are always an abstraction of the written word. Making a game requires much more resources than writing a short story or fleshing out an idea for a novel.
Things are going great for me as a writer. A bunch of my short stories have been published in the past, in February this year another was published. In summer and autumn two more will be published and available as print and ebook.
Most importantly I found a publisher for my steampunk-detective stories that revolve around Robert Fuchs– investigator of the supernatural.
That alone makes this a very exciting time for me.

I’ve been writing steampunk stories for a while. My ultimately abandoned adventure game project ‘Eerievale’ was set in the same world. The project was just too big at the time and I didn’t have the experience I have now.
When I sit down to plot a story it’s not so different to writing for a game. Sometimes the only thing that keeps me from turning a story into a game, is my limited resources.
As indie developer, I don’t have a team and making a game all on my own just takes so much time. I need months to tell a story in a game, writing that same story for print only takes days or weeks at best.
Yet I can’t deny that I miss making games, too.

With the adventure games released in recent months, I always wonder what games I could make of my stories if I just had the time. They won’t be big commercial games, but they would be what I wanted to play myself as adventure gamer.
Whenever I have an idea for such a project, I write it down. Eventually some ideas grow into actual concepts that are just waiting to be made.
I talked to friends and it’s become clear to me that while my writing is progressing, I need to invest more time into my other creative work.
There is no point in waiting and hoping to one day find the time to do what I always wanted.
I need to find a way to do it anyway just as I do with writing.

My plan for the coming half of 2017 is to do exactly that. Find more time for writing and my game ideas.